Creating a Real Unicorn

And now it’s time, as the bard said, to speak of many things. Instead of cabbages and kings, we will touch on unicorns with wings.

First things first. I do not propose to use sorcery to construct a magical creature. You will have rely on the tender mercies of your local politician if you want someone to spin fantasies out of whole cloth and to make you believe you can have everything you want and that it will cost you absolutely nothing.

I propose to make a flesh and blood unicorn—perhaps even a winged one—using science.

We start at the obvious starting point with a white horse. Now in the beginning as we work our way up to it we could merely tie or glue a plastic horn to the white horse’s forehead to get a simulated unicorn. Or we could get cousin Jeffie who seems to be willing to do anything as long as it’s sufficiently foolish, to don a unicorn head mask like the ones they sell at Amazon.

At our next level of unicorn approximation we might study animals like narwhals and the rhinoceros that are naturally horned and try to clone just the cells from those animals that produce the horn. So we would try to grow a horn in a petri dish or a test tube, just as we might try to grow any other organ. We might even branch out and try to grow such things as teeth, tusks or bone of any sort in a test tube. Once we figure out how to grow bone in a test tube we graft it on to a horse’s forehead. I don’t have a clear idea how long all this would take to prefect. Let’s be optimistic and say a decade.

During that decade we have geneticists look at other ways of growing a unicorn. Basically they will look at introducing the horn producing genes into horse embryos and produce a creature that was born a unicorn.

Yet another path to producing a unicorn might be a viral attack on a horse embryo. The virus rewrites the embryo in such a way as to produce a unicorn.

There are even more ways the feat could be tried. Sequence the DNA of horned animals and that of horses. Change the DNA of a horse embryo before it begins dividing so that it will produce the horn.

Many years later, we have a horse with a horn on its head. We could use similar methods that we used to give the horse a horn to give the horse functional wings.

Some finishing touches might be to give the horse rainbow blood and rainbow poop. The rainbow blood might be a little iffy so I will skip that for now. Rainbow poop should actually be pretty easy. Wasn’t there a black burger that turned human poop green? All we need is to experiment with feeding the horse dyed hay and oats and until we get the desired poop colors.

Presto, a winged unicorn with rainbow colored poop is born. I am not sure how well the animal will do with a heavy horn on its head, wings of dubious utility, and a diet designed to produce rainbow excrement but it will meet the basic specs of a unicorn.

There could be so many problems with this approach that one hardly knows where to begin. There are two basic overriding problems: Ethics and cost. Both problems can easily be overcome by moving operations to North Korea. They have no ethics and like any communist dictatorship they have very little problem with the idea of spending their national treasure on items that are both ridiculous and preposterous. In other words, North Korea is the perfect place to create a unicorn using shall we say: Weird Science. The icing on the cake is that there was a story some time back about unicorns and North Korea so they should be excited about the prospect of making the doubters shut up and producing a real, live unicorn.

To round out the fantasy the North Koreans could gather skin and hair from the world’s most beautiful women, clone those women, make them into mindless zombies and produce before the eyes of a wondering world, beautiful naked zombie clones riding unicorns. Several thousand if not several millions of bucket lists will probably kicked by that event alone.